own personal sacrifice, in the imitation of Christ.
But there is another important aspect to Campbell’s heroic quest, the obstacles that the “fabulous forces” of darkness must throw at the hero in order to frighten him from his mission. From the time of Aristotle, the quest has been expressed in what Hollywood today calls the three-act structure, which I might summarize thus: The hero is called away from his normal existence, usually against his will or despite his unworthiness; he encounters all manner of setbacks, dangers, and temptations, which imperil him so greatly that it seems to the audience he can never escape; and, finally, he overcomes, accomplishes the mission, and returns as best he can to the status quo ante—but he is irrevocably changed.
(It is instructive to note that the tale of Christ’s Passion conforms exactly to this structure: the entry into Jerusalem to confront his destiny; the Agony in the Garden and the Crucifixion; and, at last, the triumph of the Resurrection.)
One of the Aristotelian conditions of storytelling is that the story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. This arc is so fundamental to the Western way of design that the entire history of drama and literature is unthinkable without it. Obviously, such is not the case with the ongoing struggle between Right and Left, but that is only because we are experiencing the story as it is occurring, having been born into it, and we will almost certainly depart from it before the outcome is clear. We are merely the Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns of the plot. But outcome there must certainly be.
A good example of this structure from the Homeric era is the figure of Ulysses. In love with his wife, Penelope, he (in the non-Homeric versions of the story) feigns madness in order to escape his call to duty in the Trojan War (Act One). When that fails, he fights bravely and victoriously alongside his legendary comrades, breaking the stalemate with the invention of the Trojan Horse (Act Two, Part One); he then must endure a decade of wandering and many dangers (Act Two, Part Two). He finally manages to return home to Ithaca and oust the suitors who, like locusts, have descended on his wife and property in his absence (Act Three). It is a rare tale that does not follow this intuitive narrative structure.
What the West has experienced since the end of the Second World War has been the erection of a modern Devil’s Pleasure Palace, a Potemkin village built on promises of “social justice” and equality for all, on visions of a world at last divorced from toil and sweat, where every man and woman is guaranteed a living, a world without hunger or want or cold or fear or racism or sexism (or any of the many other “isms” the Left is forever inventing—Linnaeus had nothing on the Left in the taxonomy department).
A world, in other words, that sounds very much like Heaven. It is the world promised us by Critical Theory and by the principal figures of the Frankfurt School: the music critic Theodor Adorno; the sex theorist Wilhelm Reich (whose theories and writings I shall examine in detail); as well as founding fathers Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács.
Instead, as empirical evidence proclaims, this world has become Hell. The world sought by the Frankfurt School and its Critical Theory disciples is all an illusion, just as surely as the Teufels Lustschloss was. The corpses of the untold millions who have died in the attempts of the literally Unholy Left to found the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth, divorced from God, surely testify. Our pleasure palaces are many and varied, ranging from the creature comforts of modern civilization and its nearly endless opportunities for self-abnegating entertainment to our gleeful, olly-olly-oxen-free abjuration of formal religion, and to our false sense of enduring cultural security, which was only partly dented by the events of September 11, 2001. And yet our pleasure palaces can and will fall, as have those of all civilizations before ours. And unlike in Schubert’s opera, this time there is no guaranteed happy ending.
Something wicked this way has come, and we are in the fight of our lives. How, or even whether, we choose to fight it is not the subject of this book. The subject is why we must.
And fast by hanging in a golden Chain
This pendant world, in bigness as a Star
Of smallest Magnitude close by the Moon.
Thither full fraught with mischievous revenge,
Accursed, and in a cursed hour he hies.
— Paradise Lost, Book Two
Rage is the salient characteristic of Satan and of the satanic in men. There are others, including guile, deceit, and temptation. But at the heart of Satan’s mission is an overwhelming animus against God and the godly. In the second book of Milton’s epic poem, Satan has a conference with his fellow demons, determined to loose the bonds of Hell, where he has been chained, and carry the fight to the Principal Enemy (the name, let us recall, that the Communist Soviets gave to the capitalist United States during the Cold War) in the only battlefield that remains open to him: Earth.
Miraculously, God lets him do it. Passing the twin guardians of Hell’s gate—Satan’s offspring, Sin and Death—he launches himself upward “like a pyramid of fire.” Directed by Chaos, Lucifer traverses the void, leaving in his wake a bridge from Hell to Earth, to provide a pathway for the demons who will surely follow upon its completion.
Since this poetic moment—itself derived from the oldest Western foundational narrative of them all, Genesis—the war, the fight, the struggle, the Kampf has raged essentially uninterrupted. It is Genesis that first lays out the ur-Kampf, the primal conflict, with which we are dealing even to this day. One may deny the specifics of Genesis; the cult of “science” has made that easy to do. But what one cannot do is deny its poetry, which resonates deeply within our souls. And poetry clearly precedes science, so which is more likely to be truer to the human soul?
Please note that I am not making an “anti-science” argument here but merely questioning the modern notion of the supremacy of science over its antecedents, poetry and drama. Science has much to teach us, but its primary function is incremental, not universal (no serious scientist pretends that it is). There is no “settled science,” but there is a settled ur-Narrative, no matter how much or how often the Left may inveigh against it and try to substitute new norms for it. Before we were aware of the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, we were aware of the movements of our hearts.
Conflict is the essence of history, but also of drama. Without conflict, there can be no progress, without progress there can be no history, without history there can be no culture, without culture there can be no civilization. And—since nothing in this world, or any other possible world in the universe, is or can be static—without the cultural artifact of drama, there can be no civilization. The least dramatic place on earth was the Garden of Eden. Then Eve met the Serpent, and the rest is history. From Genesis, Chapter Three:
1 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall
